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Thursday, March 13, 2003

Review - Dehli 9

Artist: Tosca

Posted
on Thu, Mar 13, 2003 at 4:00 AM

Dehli 9Label: !K7Media: CDFormat: AlbumWorkNameSort: Dehli 9

Just like Tosca's "Suzuki" album wasn't a downtempo meditation on Japanese motorcycles, neither is "Dehli 9" a (misspelled) trip-hop journey into the ninth ward of India's capital city. The title is a reference to the band that Richard Dorfmeister and Rupert Huber were in ages ago, before they reteamed as Tosca. As such, it's also a nod to the earlier group's musical reliance on live instrumentation -- rather than sequences and samples. Though Tosca (and to a greater degree, Dorfmeister's other well-known collaboration, Kruder & Dorfmeister) has done much to expand the capabilities of chilled beats, there's been a consistent stream of organic reality on all their tracks. On "Dehli 9" that stream is broadened to yield a work that -- though constructed and tweaked digitally -- was built upon a foundation of live instrumentation. Nonetheless, "Dehli 9" stays true to Tosca's heavy-lidded style of Euro-funk, allowing dubby cuts like "Gute Laune" (which steals a melody line from a Tom Jones song) to flourish alongside the casual glide of "Dave Dudley." Furthering the album's theme, a second disc is included that finds Dorfmeister digitally reworking some of Huber's solo piano pieces